AMD FX-8350 Processor Review: Tuned-Up Bulldozer. Page 7

Piledriver microarchitecture, a refreshed Bulldozer, has finally reached the flagship AMD FX processors. Will it make the Socket AM3+ platform more appealing than LGA 1155? Quite possible, because the new AMD microarchitecture wasn’t the only trick they had up their sleeve.

Performance in Applications

To test the processors performance during data archiving we resort to WinRAR archiving utility. Using maximum compression rate we archive a folder with multiple files with 1.1 GB total size.

The developers of the popular WinRAR archiving tool have recently optimized their product for systems with multi-core processors. As a result, eight-core AMD processors started doing very well in this test. This is why the new FX-8350 outperforms the top Core i5 CPU here. However, it is still unable to beat the Core i7-3770K with Hyper-Threading technology.

The processor performance in cryptographic tasks is measured using a built-in benchmark of the popular TrueCrypt utility that uses AES-Twofish-Serpent “triple” encryption. I have to say that this utility not only loads any number of cores with work in a very efficient manner, but also supports special AES instructions.

Eight cores and AVX instructions support help processors with Bulldozer and Piledriver microarchitectures to cope pretty well with data encryption tasks. And FX-8350, which runs about 15% faster than its predecessor, outperforms even the top quad-core competitor – Core i7-3770K.

Now that the eighth version of the popular scientific Mathematica suite is available, we decided to bring it back as one of our regular benchmarks. We use MathematicaMark8 integrated into this suite to test the systems performance:

And in Wolfram Mathematica AMD products have totally failed. Paired floating-point units and a decoder with limited throughput make contemporary AMD microarchitecture very vulnerable in this testing suite. As a result, even the new FX-8350 is significantly behind the junior contemporary Core i5.

We measured the performance in Adobe Photoshop CS6 using our own benchmark made from Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test that has been creatively modified. It includes typical editing of four 24-megapixel images from a digital photo camera.

Intel processors have long boasted high performance results in Adobe Photoshop. The arrival of Bulldozer didn’t change anything. The new version of this microarchitecture, Piledriver, implemented in the new FX-8350, also didn’t have any significant effect. The new AMD processor turned out about 9% faster than FX-8150, but it still falls behind the junior quad-core CPU with Ivy Bridge microarchitecture.

The performance in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 is determined by the time it takes to render a Blu-ray project with a HDV 1080p25 video into H.264 format and apply different special effects to it.

High definition video content processing is an excellent example of well-paralleled load. Multi-core architectures should feel at home in tasks like that, which is exactly what we see in the diagram. Eight-core AMD FX-8350 processor does way better here than in many other cases. It runs as fast as Core i5-3570K. However, Intel Core i7-3770K with four cores and Hyper-Threading support is still considerably faster than the new AMD product.

In order to measure how fast our testing participants can transcode a video into H.264 format we used x264 HD Benchmark 5.0. It works with an original MPEG-2 video recorded in 1080p resolution with 20 Mbps bitrate. I have to say that the results of this test are of great practical value, because the x264 codec is also part of numerous popular transcoding utilities, such as HandBrake, MeGUI, VirtualDub, etc.

Video transcoding with the x264 codec is an example of an ideal task for contemporary AMD processors. Here FX-8350 demonstrates 15% better results than its predecessor on Zambezi design, and is faster than any of the LGA 1155 Intel CPUs during the heaviest second transcoding pass. It partially owes its success to the use of new TBM, FMA3 and BMI1 instructions supported by the Piledriver microarchitecture.

Following our readers’ requests, we’ve added a new HD video benchmark to our tests. SVPmark3 shows the computer performance in the SmoothVideo Project application which makes videos smoother by adding new intermediary frames. The numbers in the diagram reflect the speed of processing Full HD videos without the graphics card’s help.

Here the new FX-8350 doesn’t work as fast as Core i7-3770K, but its performance is nevertheless quite impressive: it is 25% faster than Core i5-3570K.

We will test computational performance and rendering speeds in Autodesk 3ds max 2011 using the special SPECapc for 3ds max 2011 benchmark:

During rendering in 3ds max 2011 we see the highest performance improvement that occurs during the AMD processor generation change. FX-8350 is almost 20% faster than FX-8150. As a result, the performance of the newcomer on Piledriver microarchitecture falls between that of Core i5-3570K and Core i7-3770K. This is an undeniable success for a sub-$200 processor.

We use special Cinebench 11.5 benchmark to test final rendering speed in Maxon Cinema 4D suite.

The performance of the AMD FX-8150 processor in Cinebench test used to be ridiculously low, but now things have improved dramatically. FX-8350 is now 15% faster and therefore it outperforms Core i5-3570K. However, Core i7-3770K is even faster than that, which means that a dual-core Piledriver module is still not as fast as a single Ivy Bridge core with enabled Hyper-Threading technology.